the Mississippi River dumps its Mississippi juice into the ocean right here in a Delta
below the City of New Orleans but it's not actually supposed to do that in fact the
Mississippi River should enter the ocean here and be shaped like this the only reason it doesn't is
because the US government has spent billions of dollars over several decades to make sure that
it stays on this exact course but how do they do that and why exactly do they care so much
well let's zoom out a bit this is the United States of America which is a very large rock
that has lots of bears on it and this is the Mississippi river which is a river ever since
there were people on this continent who wanted to move stuff this River was important for thousands
of years it served as America's wet primordial highway system being one of the most efficient
ways of moving people and Cargo in out and around the greatest country in the United
States it became particularly useful during the Industrial Revolution when Americans had bigger
things to move and bigger ships to move them but there was a bit of a problem the Mississippi River
was not designed to turn the cogs of capitalism it was only designed to make water go whoosh
the real trouble was right here on the border of Mississippi in Louisiana when America was first
settled by indigenous populations the Mississippi flowed more or less straight into the ocean But as
time wore on and the river got older it also like all of us got a little curvier and one such curve
was this turnbull's Bend where the Mississippi cut across to intersect with the nearby Red River this
detour took hours to navigate and mathematicians at the time had just discovered that time equals
money so a river engineer by the name of Henry schrapp said hey let's just dig a channel straight
from here to here I bet that won't cause any massive logistical problems in the future I don't
even know why I'm saying why are you writing all this down just go dig the stupid Channel already
so in 1831 they went ahead and dug a channel which was great because they could move crates of pecan
slightly faster but was bad because the river started to slowly and irreversibly change shape
in a way that would devastate the US economy and potentially kill tens of thousands of people but
hey everyone makes mistakes and I'd be lying if I said I never accidentally caused an ecological
catastrophe by digging in Canal Louisiana without considering its long-term effects so let's talk
about what exactly the problem is and how the government has scrambled to keep it under control
you see when the canal was dug this part of the river pretty much dried up and the flow from the
Mississippi into the Red River created a shiny new river called the achafalaya great everyone loves
a new River but the problem was that this River naturally has a much shorter and steeper path to
the Gulf of Mexico and over time more and more of the Mississippi started to flow this way instead
of this way by the 1950s government realized that if they didn't do something the Mississippi would
completely change course and divert into the achafalaya which both sounds bad and is bad
problem number one all the ports from here to here including the major cargo ports of Baton
Rouge and New Orleans stop working no more water means no more ports no more ports means no more
exporting soybeans and no more exporting soybeans means I I don't know a whole bunch of people lose
a whole bunch of money problem number two all 1.5 million people living in this general area
no longer have drinking water while it might not be immediately clear why this is a problem Studies
have shown that people need to drink water to live and from this we can conclude that cutting off the
water supply for Louisiana's two largest cities would be a bad thing problem number three well
it sure seems like the people around here enjoy the water from the Mississippi River that doesn't
necessarily mean that water would be welcome over here in fact most of Morgan City and Berwick would
end up pretty much destroyed in the process okay so assuming you're in the Pro drinking water and
anti-morgan City being destroyed in a devastating flood I probably convinced you that it would be
bad if the Mississippi changed course so how exactly have we stopped it from doing that well
in the early 1960s the U.S Army Corps of engineer went ahead and constructed something called The
Old River control structure right here where turnbull's ban used to be in order to control
the flow of the Mississippi into the achafalaya they slapped navigation lock down here and a
Floodgate up here The Floodgate maintains a flow of 30 this way and 70 this way to match the flow
of the river when the structure was originally built thus preventing it from you know doing the
bad thing they later added a second Floodgate here to reduce the impact on the first flood gate and a
hydropower plant here so that this whole thing feels like it actually does something besides
waste billions of dollars undoing a decision that some guy made 200 years ago before they
hadn't been to the concept of consequences but hey you know what else has catastrophic consequences
not eating right if you're a busy person like I am you might know that maintaining a healthy
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